“Dave Tough specialised in what he called organised time which was not metronomic.
His philosophy was that human beings aren’t metronomes and drummers shouldn’t be either.
If he felt the music demanded it he would lift the tempo a couple of bpm in a particular section and bring it back down again when the tune moved on. He evidently had a way of announcing his intentions to the rest of the band by playing five crotchets on the snare drum. He’d also do this if he felt they weren’t particularly on top of the piece.”
Dave Tough was born of Scottish parents in Oak Park, Illinois on the April 26th, 1907. At the time Oak Park was a town just outside of Chicago so unsurprisingly he was ideally placed to become a leading light in the Chicago jazz scene. Since prohibition was still in place there until 1973...
mikedolbear.com
"I believe that most of the enthusiasm and the fire that I had going was given to me by Davey Tough. Because we used to sit in the bus and discuss rhythms and music—and little excursions in rhythm. which were the early motivation of what they now call the free, avant garde music, you know. We would discuss all those little possibilities. He used to call me Snuggy—that was another nickname; he would suggest what level of the instrument I should play.
If somebody was playing up high, I should play down real low and walk up to him, or vice versa—little ideas of the area of the bass to play when the huge ensemble would come in. These were things that maybe would have occurred to me, but really didn’t until he brought it out. He was a great teacher. Like, he couldn’t play a two–bar dishonest phrase; he wasn’t a soloist, but he had such a magnificent feeling for momentum—and it was for real. Yeah, he was the ideal big band drummer. We’d sit by the hour and just discuss all different kinds of non–metronomical patterns.
He didn’t believe in that “tick–tock–tick–tock–tick–tock”; he felt that the human should never get into that. At that time, the majority of bandleaders were labouring under the belief that if I beat it off “one–two–three–four”, that’s where it should end. And that’s really not the human sound; as I’m talking to you, I can feel a . .a word . . . let’s see if I can find a gesticulation of sound—it’s high, it’s low, then it slows down a bit, perhaps, then a little faster. That has a way of getting into your ear, rather than if I picked one level and just talked on that—that gets terribly monotonous.
Which is what Davey used to say to me: if you just keep that “ding–ding–ding–ding” going all the time, after a while it loses somewhere along the line. A great many bandleaders, a great many drummers and bass players, to this day, feel that . . . the thing is losing time, or it’s gaining time—oh, we just dropped there—not even thinking that the person who is doing it is a human being, and he may feel at that moment that the thing should just get a little lazy and drop down a bit, or it should get more excited and go a little bit. I believe in that.
That’s one thing that Davey drummed into me—I didn’t mean that as a pun—
non–metronomical time."
Chubby Jackson (1918–2003) Greg ‘Chubby’ Jackson was known for his sprightly bass work, and is best known for his association with the Woody Herman band. His career started in 1937 and he was active with Herman, Charlie Barnet and Charlie Ventura until 1950. From this time, he had …
nationaljazzarchive.org.uk
